What I Did Over Summer Vacation

Hello! Bonjour! Hallo! Guten Tag!

I recently arrived back home after having been away on a most amazing two week vacation with my family in Europe!!! What a fantastic trip! We flew to Paris and then traveled by train to Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Salzburg and Geneva, admiring the beautiful countrysides by train between each city, flying home again from Geneva. During our stay in each city we either walked or took mass transportation for everything except for three taxi rides in Berlin. In each city, we visited museums, marketplaces and popular landmarks and even went on a "Sound of Music" Tour in Salzburg, Austria. We love Rogers and Hammerstein musicals and the film version of The Sound of Music featuring Julie Andrews is our family's all time favorite, so this tour was especially fun for us.

I'm still organizing and editing my photos, but will post some of my favorite shots in each city over the next several days with a little more detail about our adventure.

For my fellow bibliophiles, for the first time ever on a vacation-- I actually read books! That's never happened before. The only reason I managed it on this trip was due to two long transatlantic flights and a few long train rides. I read not one, not two... but nearly three books! I say nearly three because I came very close to finishing the third one on the plane ride home, but ended up finishing the morning after we got home.

I first read Loretta Chase's new release, Silk is for Seduction--mostly while in Paris, which was exceptionally apropos since the heroine is part French and some of the book actually takes place in Paris, too! It was a wonderful story with fantastic characters, by the way. I highly recommend it if you like historical romance. I then read Visions In Death by J.D. Robb, which I enjoyed very much as well. Finally, I picked up my ARC of Tessa Dare's upcoming release, A Night to Surrender, the first book in Dare's new Spindle's Cove series, which was a very fun and sweet story. It didn't have the same poetic and epic romance feeling to it as did her prior two series, but it was still well written and enjoyable. In fact, I'm very much looking forward to the next book in the series, hoping the couple in that book is the nephew of the male protagonist in A Night to Surrender and a specific female secondary character. I don't want to give anything away, but I hope I'm right about those two.

Since we've been back, I've spent the last couple of days catching up with laundry, restocking the fridge, tending the yard [I swear the lawn and weeds both grow faster when you're not home], cleaning and tidying the house [I suspect the cats threw a couple of wild parties while we were away...], organizing and editing my hundreds of vacation photos and jumping right back into working out [The Tri is less than three weeks away--yikes!].  Now it's time to catch up with all of YOU! 

I'm going to try to catch up with all of your blogs over the next several days, but in the meantime, what's your news? I'd love to know what's been going on with you!